Welcome To The Hermit's Desk

Not shiny, mind you. Not new. Not full of refreshed energy or a zest for life. I hurt in every way possible right now, physically as well.

I apparently woke up halfway through the incubation, broke the hospital restraints, and ripped out the breathing tube, air bulb beneath it still full. It's left me with a HELL of a bruised wrist and bruised airway. They couldn't give me more anesthesia (I guess that would have been another overdose). There's a weird pride in having been able to do that - and a regret that I did, because fucking hell, it still hurts.

That I can safely say I did not mean to do. The things we do while under the delirium of anesthesia....

But I am back. Call me refurbished. Call me found art. Call me...a nervous little girl who is petrified of herself, the world around her, and what it and I will do to me.

But like Jesse told me last night, just because Mike Tyson takes a right hook to the jaw and falls to the mat, it doesn't mean he's forgotten how to fight. And as scared as I am about the fight ahead, he is right. I still know how to fight. I've done it before. I can do it again.

The Basics: I wasn't actually trying to kill myself. It was the strangest thing I think I've ever experienced. I'd thought to myself a nap would be nice, went to take a quarter of my Seroquel, and stood in the kitchen with the bottle and a glass of milk in my hand.

So casually, so frighteningly casually, went "Fuck it. Why not?" About three minutes and three handfuls later, I'd consumed 12,000 milligrams of a heavy sedative. Still not quite realizing what I'd done, I wandered out to the porch for a cigarette.

Halfway through my cigarette, again, ever so casually, thought to myself - "Hm. That might have been a dumb thing. You should probably call 911." I wandered back inside, wrote a note to Jesse that I was calling 911 and would see him at the hospital. When I dialed 911 and told them I'd meet them outside of the apartment, they told me to sit down and wait in the house for them. I didn't want to do that, didn't want to wake up and worry Jesse, but by then, I was feeling just a taaad bit on the woozy side.

I woke up Jesse, apologized, sat down, and waited.

I'm still trying to figure out the process of this impulse.

I wasn't sad. I wasn't depressed. I wasn't anxious. I wasn't in despair. I'd showered, I'd cleaned the house, I'd eaten. I was, as far as I can tell, feeling just fine. It wasn't an intentional attempt to off myself. It was an impulse, a thought that should have just floated in and out of my brain, but for some reason, my hands acted faster than my brain did.

And yet, six days later, I am wrestling with reconciling the idea that while I wasn't trying to kill myself, what I did was in no way anything BUT suicidal. There's simply no other way to put it. Even if I didn't mean it to be a suicide attempt, that's EXACTLY what it was.

How does a person tie those two things together in a way that makes any sense? People tell me that the fact that I just enough of the barest sense left to call 911 means that I did not want to die. That I'm not lost to one moment (or three) of bad judgement forever.

I'm not sure I believe that, but right now, I'm not sure of nearly anything I believe.

The prevailing theory is that after 8 months of living in an extended manic and mixed episode state due to the steroids, my sense of right and wrong, up and down, left and right, just took leave of their senses.

I didn't think to be initially worried because there just wasn't anything left in me TO be worried. The gas tank had finally hit empty and I hadn't even noticed.

That explanation makes sense. It does not ease the terror...the shame. It wasn't enough that I'd cut it myself once. It wasn't enough that I'd cut myself TWICE.

I did all that, thought I was done with that bullshit, and then made the most mismatched suicide attempt ever.

How can people still trust me after that? How can I trust MYSELF after that? I am now scared of any move that I make, any thought that it not pure zen (of which I haven't had yet), that I will somehow fall through and hurt everyone around me in irreparable ways.

I've been so strong my whole life - and have now experienced what was, to me, the weakest moment I have ever had. It is discouraging on a level that is nearly indescribable.

I thought being released from the psych ward would be like any other hospital release. A joy, a relief, a giddiness at the first cigarette I could have in a week.

It was not like that. I've not had an extended psych stay as an adult before. What happened was that I was released, had my first cigarette, and then spent the next, oh, to still this morning in one of the most anxious, hyperventilating states I've ever, ever been in.

I've been off Prednisone for a week now. I am mentally clearer, emotionally a wreck, and sad that anything spicy I might consider eating will tear up my esophagus.

I've received all responses about hope. I've never read responses so closely before. I've never needed people's experiences so much as I do right now. I've never had so much to process between what's going on in my head and what other people have told me has gone on in THEIR heads.

I want to think that I what I did doesn't mean I'd lost hope. But people with hope don't take an entire month's worth of sleeping pills at once. Somewhere along the line, along with everything else, hope had also taken its leave.

One thing I know above anything else: The trees have begun to bloom. The grass is green. It is spring. It has now been a full year of dealing with the wolf, first not all knowing why I was being torn apart by sharp teeth, and then hemorrhaging for months from having my throat ripped out.

Sometimes it also is that one's got way deeper emotional ongoings within than he consciously notices...Or, I need to say it that evilly, one has a need, but underestimates the power of medication. Underestimates that these things definitely DO work.Choose yourself what it was...

Edgar Allan Poe wrote of The Imp Of The Perverse: the sudden urge to do exactly the wrong thing. He didn't have an explanation, and the closest I have to one is that the brain is big and random shit happens therein... not very helpful.

Valerie once told me that she was walking behind me at dinner and had the sudden urge to pour hot mac-and-cheese down the back of my neck. I would have been more amused if she weren't still holding the dish when she told me.

This makes sense; as I mentioned before, my motivation in ODing was kind of: what the hell; also, for me it was a wish to escape—particularly the first time, when I was still living with my parents.

I don't know if the "cry for help" thing is always applicable, but it did give my parents the impetus to have me admitted to the psych ward.

Both times, I calmly, nonchalantly downed about 25 of the pills I actually couldn't stand because they numbed me out so badly; the second time, I walked myself to the ER and was given an emetic. (The first time had been brutal because I had had to sleep it off.)

I think I can speak for everybody else in saying we're glad you made it back.

The way I figure, you must be superlatively and monumentally tired in a way that I cannot really understand, notwithstanding that I'm no stranger either to ICUs and massively reduced energy and unforeseen pain.

...So I figure that in some part of your brain the prospect of that going on indefinitely is supremely unappealing. At that point, "what's the fucking point?" and "why the hell not?" become not thought exercises but genuinely meaningful questions - and the impulse to discover the answers might just become irresistible.

Hell, even pain that you welcome you want to see cease, sooner or later.

In the face of that I have no answers, just gratitude that your ego was quick about stepping in and getting your fingers to dial for EMS.